THE CURRENT CINEMA Bergman About Love t) & 1.,., 4 ,, -.. -I -- , -I "WII J / .-.:..' .:t..:.L:. \ :i-- ' L- t _ - - '- . S OME are more mortal than oth- ers. Ingmar Bergman's new film, "The Touch," the hest about love he has eVer made, is a record of a man who brings into the existence of a calmly married couple his own feeling that death is something that has to be al11bushed daily. The couple, Swedish, a doctor and a housewife, are played by Max van Sydow and Bibi Andersson. Their nalTIes are Andreas and Ka- rin, and their life is fine. The invader, whom they are each and differently devoted to, is a German-American Jew called David, played by El- liott Gould. He lives as if he were running onto the end of a hlade. \Vho would think that Elliott Gould, whose American pictures have cast hIm as a gusty hell- raise r, could have the great technique and responsiveness to tip the balance for an alien director who sensed thLlt he could play .:1 figure of .:lncient trouble? The Swedes speak English to him and Swedish between the1l1se Ives. The pr dctical sohl tion is aesthctica1Jy perfect. The hesit(lncie and the in timclcies are precise: one closed world, known Llnd :fluent; one not Inapped, c:ind dLlngerous. David's self-hatred bites his bones. rrhis isn't the Elliott Gould we know. lIe even looks different in Berglnan's picture, which was photographed by Sven Nykvist. The lowering, poetic head, often seen in closeup, has huge povver and gentleness. The character loathes himself very confu ingly for anyone fond of him Sometimes the touch of his affair with Karin soothes hiI11, but sometimes it drives him into a fury because he so powerfully dreads the loss of it. The dread practically Inakes hil11 precipitate the loss, like a Inan so horrified by his own mor- tdlity that he kills hin1self. The two others live their lives dS if everything were going to last forever; his be- havior is a trap for anticipated death, laid in a rage, with hIm shlvenng be- hind the hedge. \Vhat is he bnnging into the lives of these two happy blond neutralists, this rancorous man? Elliott Gould's acting has always had an edge of danger, and Berglnan uses it won- derfully. Karin's mother hds just died. At the beginning of the film, Karin i" racing to the hospital too late. No crying in the room. A nurse bnngs her the wed- o v ding ring. She escapes then into the dark somewhere and hides to weep. David looms into her sanctuary and pUts on the lights. "Can I do SOIne- h . f ... "" T h 1 . h t Ing or your urn t e Ig ts down, please. Please leave me dlone " A whj}e later, when Andreas has treated David for what is said to be some kidney trouble, David is spending an evening with the two of them. Alone with her for a few moments, he blurts out that he is in love with her. She pays no heed, it seems. Turn the lights down, please. Please leave me alone. v'l e're happy, her silence yells. David persists in talk- ing out loud. He first saw her when she was crying at the hospital, he says. Her face blocks him. Perhaps she remembers hiln, perhaps not. "You were sitting In the clodkrooln crying. I fell in lOCZJD 'ZJJith you," he savs. The affair they have later shuttles between the same extremes of concern and clamor, and always seems rooted in that moment at the hospital when Karin was unlike herself and didn't want to be seen, and when David was touched and caught up by the sight of a fellow-sufferer. Most of his family were killed hy the Na7is. He was brought up in Americd. Now he is dn archeologist, digging up a past that he can't leave alone. You can watch his 111ind sometimes wreck- ing the present for him by going over and over old soil. The film uncurls slowly, in ti:TIe with what Karin takes in. One learns only much later that he wa treated by Andreas not for kidney stones but for putting his h ad in a gas oven, and that he has a lethally at- tached sister in London who has known about Karin all the time when Kann has never heard of her. After the first dinner, when the In- surgent has left, Andreas and Karin go to bed. The intimacy between them eems exact. They are without suspi- cion, joking and muttering, like erotic twins. The peculiar chaos uf David's preSLnce that evening can be ignored. Andreas, an intelligent, watchful man with the outward style of someone bor- ing, was showing home-movie slides: l(arin and the children, and some stud- ies of orchids. The orchids drove David mad. "Haven't you a pIcture of your wife nude?" he said, off the top of hi hecld. The couple forget, for the mo- n1 e n t 57 Ribi Andersson hc:ls never hefore giv- en such a perforlnance. In the scenes between Karin and ...:t\ndreas, every- thing is long-established and Eght. The attachlnent is feathery. No peril eÀists. "Then she goes to David's :flat and be- gins to fall in love with hÎ1TI, she be- haves with the san1e instant trust but also horrows some of his raw in1pulse. On the first ddY, he loses his nerve and can't stop talking bashful1v d.bout the weather and her clothes, which she has already changed ten tpnes with a self- mocking and sad chagrin over what she looks like; she is the one who gets then1 to bed. Her legs c:lre rather too short and her notto111 is too big, she sa) s, gabbling the n10 t touching breakneck inventory of herself. "Shut up!" he seems to bL yelling .:It her "1'111 cl d ' I " ... I ' Inonster, on t you rea 17e r can t f ' " b ." Inanage you 1 you re gOIng to e nIce. I t takes hÜn 111 on ths to deal with the pure, sweet key of her feeling for him. Meanwhile, for the first time in her life, she takes on the onus of dup1i ity. Hard. Berglnan cuts backward and forward hetween the couple's pretty, cultivated house dnd Ddvid's :flat, which is near some building site with screan1- ing buzz saws. Moments of the affaIr seem benedictive. The two of them live on bits and pieces of tÏtne, and he flies into rages about the bourgeois don1estic- ity that he accuses of robbing him. F'or a while, she pulls him out of the lTIud. She hasn't an idea, this :flaxen wife, of what he has taken on, and perhaps the very fact that she doesn't know it is what transforlns him. He looks at her with amazing softness, unseen by her, while she reads a poem to hin1 in Swed- ish, laughing at herself a hit, and then tries to translate it. \Vhat's the word? To do with fireplace. Something they had long ago. "Hearth," he says. The paradox is that she and And reas prob- ably have five hedrths, and that it i David, the antiquarian, who is dragging her into the world of buzz saws. The film is partly about a man introducIng someone he adores to the very sophisti- cation about mortality and extinction that he loves her for not h'lving. "The Touch" is also about C0m- pacts. David gets' furious with Andreas for ever 111entioning again that be tried to kill himself. \Ve agreed not to, he says, to get out of the impossibilit) that he is in the mIddle of being confron ted with an Andreas talking about the ma- jor compact between hÏtnself and Ka- rin. The most powerful of })avid's agreelnents, 1110ving c:lnd deathly, tlll ns OUt to he with the congenitally ill sister in London Her hlood runs in him, in every way. "\\1 e are inscpara-